George Wendt

Cheers For Chicago From An Alum In L.a.

August 19, 1990|By George Wendt was interviewed by Chicago free-lance writer Norma Libman.

I didn`t have any idea I was going to be in show business when I graduated with a degree in economics from Rockhurst College in Kansas City, Mo. I hadn`t the faintest idea what I was going to do. In the back of my mind I thought it would be logical to join my father`s real estate business. I wound up traveling around Europe instead. I guess I was trying to stave off reality.

In 1973, I returned to Chicago and, by process of elimination, decided to join Second City. One of the last college courses I had taken was metaphysics, and one of the things that stuck with me was the concept of alienation. I didn`t want to be alienated, by my career choice, from what would make me feel good about myself. In my youthful idealism, I was determined not to do something I hated.

No, I`d hate that. Fireman, cowboy? I`d hate those.`` I remembered going to Second City during college and I thought that would be a fun job. You know, five or six folks just goofing off on stage. And I thought, ``I bet I wouldn`t hate that.`` And I was pretty sure they got paid.

So I enrolled in Players Workshop at Second City. I wasn`t trying to be an actor. It never occurred to me, not even in a blip, that I could be an actor. I had tunnel vision, career-wise. All I wanted to do was be in Second City. I had no concept of show business or acting, no overview.

And I was right-about not hating it. It was the coolest job. It was a riot. You`d be surprised how many people would come up to us after the show and ask if we got paid because it seemed like we were having so much fun up there. So I joined the workshop in September 1973, spent a year there and ended up in Second City, where I spent the next six years. In 1980, I went to L.A. and got started in television.

My wife, Bernadette Birkett, whom I met in Chicago, and I both miss the city. We wish our kids could grow up there. And we`d like to be near our families. We all know the litany of qualities that living in Chicago affords that cannot easily be duplicated in the Los Angeles area.

I don`t know if this is a function of the place or the time in which we live, but materialism seems much more rampant in Los Angeles in 1990 than it was in Chicago in the `50s. Peer pressure and status-from skate boards and surfing equipment to automobiles-is incredible here. You`re a leper if you don`t have a car at 16. I had a very comfortable upbringing, but I would never have even dreamed of asking for a car.

There was a sense of freedom as a child in Chicago-once you got the CTA situation all sorted out-that doesn`t exist here; a dizzying sense of freedom. I lived on the Southwest Side, near 95th and Western. We could just jump on the Western Avenue bus and eventually be at Riverview-at Western and Belmont- without even having to ask our parents if we could go. Or we could take a bus to 35th, and we`d be at Sox Park. We could hop on the Rock Island and go downtown and cavort around horrible tattoo parlors and try and peek into the burlesque houses.

It was a lot of fun to be able to get around town like that, and we weren`t really too concerned with the dangers that may have been lurking. We were sort of blindly unaware. Our parents would warn us not to go to the woods. But the woods were two blocks away from our homes, so who cared? That`s not where we wanted to go anyway. We preferred to go to Van Buren Street and hang around tattoo parlors.

Another wonderful thing about life in Chicago was the neighborhood feeling. The cops were so nice to us. When I was 12 or 13, we weren`t going to take over for Capone or anything, but we`d break the occasional window or something, and they`d take us home. You never got a feeling of strangers with the cops; you got a feeling of community. They were always the same ones, and they knew us. There was some continuity, almost a small-town life within a big city.

There are a thousand other things. Father Andrew Greeley was our parish priest. He writes a lot about the basketball courts and other aspects of my neighborhood of Beverly. Kids from all over would migrate there for basketball and just to hang out. The courts were sort of unofficial community centers for the teens in the neighborhood. There`d be some beer drinking, some swearing, spitting and cigarette smoking. I suppose the usual sexual experimentation took wing there too. It all seems sort of benign by today`s standards, but I wish our children could have the opportunity to live that life.